Poor, poor old fellow!

Lankester’s whole being softened into pity.  Yet he had no illusions as to the man before him—­a man of inferior morale and weak will, incapable, indeed, of the clever brutalities by which the wicked flourish; incapable also of virtues that must, after all, be tolerably common, or the world would run much more lamely than it does.  Straight, honorable, unselfish fellows—­Lankester knew scores of them, rich and poor, clever and slow, who could and did pass the tests of life without flinching; who could produce in any society—­as politicians or green-grocers—­an impression of uprightness and power, an effect of character, that Marsham, for all his ability, had never produced, or, in the long run, and as he came to be known, had never sustained.

Well, what then?  In the man looking down on Marsham not a tinge of pharisaic condemnation mingled with the strange clearness of his judgment.  What are we all—­the best of us?  Lankester had not parted, like the majority of his contemporaries, with the “sense of sin.”  A vivid, spiritual imagination, trained for years on prayer and reverie, showed him the world and human nature—­his own first and foremost—­everywhere flecked and stained with evil.  For the man of religion the difference between saint and sinner has never been as sharp as for the man of the world; it is for the difference between holiness and sin that he reserves his passion.  And the stricken or repentant sinner is at all times nearer to his heart than the men “who need no repentance.”

Moreover, it is in men like Lankester that the ascetic temper common to all ages and faiths is perpetually reproduced, the temper which makes of suffering itself a divine and sacred thing—­the symbol of a mystery.  In his own pity for this emaciated arrested youth he read the pledge of a divine sympathy, the secret voice of a God suffering for and with man, which, in its myriad forms, is the primeval faith of the race.  Where a thinker of another type would have seen mere aimless waste and mutilation, this evangelical optimist bared the head and bent the knee.  The spot whereon he stood was holy ground, and above this piteous sleeper heavenly dominations, princedoms, powers, hung in watch.

He sank, indeed, upon his knees beside the sleeper.  In the intense and mystical concentration, which the habit of his life had taught him, the prayer to which he committed himself took a marvellous range without ever losing its detail, its poignancy.  The pain, moral and physical, of man—­pain of the savage, the slave, the child; the miseries of innumerable persons he had known, whose stories had been confided to him, whose fates he had shared; the anguish of irreparable failure, of missed, untasted joy; agonies brutal or obscure, of nerve and brain!—­his mind and soul surrendered themselves to these impressions, shook under the storm and scourge of them.  His prayer was not his own; it seemed to be the Spirit wrestling with Itself, and rending his own weak life.